Estimating Food Waste as Household Production Inefficiency
By Yang Yu, Edward C. Jaenicke. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2020
130 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Measuring food waste at the individual household level has been nearly impossible because comprehensive, current data on uneaten food do not exist. By using food acquisition data, this article employs a new approach to estimating household‐level food waste via a stochastic production frontier model in which food waste is identified as input inefficiency. For households in our data, the average household wastes 31.9% of the food it buys, and this figure, using survey weights, translates to annual U.S. consumer‐level food waste valued at $240 billion. In addition, by accommodating heterogeneous wasting behavior, we find that healthier diets and higher income lead to more household food waste, whereas lower household food security, food‐assistance program participation, and larger household sizes are associated with less food waste.
Subfields: Food Science, General Health Professions, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ec5e977e1b511233dda7dc5c1facea358339850c
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In General Health Professions
Citations in the corpus
- Drivers of food waste reduction behaviour in the household context (2021, background): “Furthermore, the average U.S. household wastes 31.9% of their food, a cost of $1,866 per household annually or an annual cost of $240 billion nationwide (Yu & Jaenicke, 2020).”